Last week, those favoring reductions in prison populations and their associated costs applauded Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that he's seeking an end to mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders. For administration critics who feel drug war reforms have been too long in coming, the news was a welcome sign that real ground is being gained during Obama's presidency. Inside the administration, there's clearly a sense of accomplishment. "It's a really important shift," says Raphael Lamaitre, Communications Director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). "Substance abuse touches everybody, it's the great equalizer. For years we've had too many people in prison and we haven't been looking at why they're there."

But as the excitement over the mandatory minimum announcement cools, some public health and drug policy professionals are finding devils in the details of Holder's statement. Specifically, critics are troubled by the latter parts of Holder's address that highlight the requirement of mandatory court stipulated drug treatment as a requirement for nonviolent drug offenders to stay out of jail. Laura Thomas, deputy director for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) in California, says, "It's always good to have someone like Eric Holder talking about the counterproductive harms of over incarceration, that's really fantastic. But there is a concern that putting people into coerced drug treatment is not a health based approach, it's a criminal justice approach."

Lemaitre of the ONDCP feels that the expansion of programs that blend criminal justice and public health -- programs he says are proven to reduce costs and improve health outcomes -- is another win for the administration that should be celebrated by anyone who wants drug users to get help instead of jail time. And he points out that the $1.4 billion boost in funding to pay for the policy shift that will come along with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2014 represents "the largest single year expansion of treatment funding in a generation, maybe of all time."

'There is a concern that putting people into coerced drug treatment is not a health based approach, it's a criminal justice approach.'

The problem, critics say, with the new system the administration envisions is that while addiction may be a great equalizer, who gets arrested for drug crimes is not. Holder's address noted this fact, stating that "...some of the enforcement priorities we've set have had a destabilizing effect on particular communities, largely poor and of color." And yet while Holder is willing to shift the policy towards sentencing people convicted of drug offenses, there's nothing in his address stating that law enforcement will be any less likely to arrest people for them. Presumably the racial disparities in arrest rates will continue.

"The more relevant victory regarding racial disparities in arrests this week was the Stop & Frisk decision," says Thomas, referring to the federal judge's ruling that the controversial policy was tantamount to racial profiling. "The justice system is broken but needs to be fixed across the whole system, including the people we arrest, not just how we sentence."

Criminal justice policy reformers say that when courts flood the drug treatment centers with the kinds of drug offenders who more often get arrested, the outcome is no longer a system for treating drug addicts who want help with their drug problems. Instead, the treatment system becomes an extensive community-based surveillance network whose primary purpose is to monitor the behavior of people who are primarily black and poor. In fact, as some sociologists have argued, this changes the definition of what a drug problem is and who requires treatment. This suits perfectly the needs of a justice system that refuses to decriminalize drugs, but now has to put offenders somewhere other than jail.

To illustrate this problem, picture two different drug users. The first is 19 years old, white and attends a big city private university. Like a lot of college kids, he likes to party. From Thursday through Sunday he's probably either drinking heavily and smoking pot, or getting ready to do so. The rest of the week finds him trying to catch up on his school work, but he'll still take a toke here and there between classes or after hours in the dorm if someone offers it to him. When he gets really slammed with work during midterms and finals he'll find a classmate with some extra Adderall and abuse those pills, crushing them into a powder and snorting them, to power through some all-nighters. At the end of the semester his grades aren't bad, so his parents aren't complaining, although they'd probably be concerned if they knew the full extent of his partying. He's not too concerned with the extent of his partying, because most of the people he knows at school party just like he does. If he sat down in front of an addiction treatment professional for an evaluation, he'd likely qualify as having a substance use disorder and would receive a referral to outpatient treatment. But he doesn't feel like he has a problem, doesn't want to stop using drugs, and doesn't want help for what he considers to be part of his typical college lifestyle.

As long as he keeps his grades up and stays out of trouble, he probably won't ever be in a situation where he's formally labeled as problem substance user. Since he's underage most of the partying he does is on campus, where city police rarely go except to handle crimes committed by outsiders, and the campus police aren't trying to bust underage drinkers, or pot smokers, or kids trading pills, so his chances of getting arrested and charged with a drug crime are fairly slim. If he ever attends a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, it will likely be because he chose to attend one, not because a judge or probation officer sent him to one.

But is this nonviolent drug offender's primary problem drug addiction, or is it with being black and poor and more likely to be arrested as a result?

The second drug user is also 19 years old, but he's African American and lives in the poor neighborhood across town from the private university. From a clinical perspective, his drug use doesn't look that much different from user number one's; drug user two also smokes weed on more days than not and when he smokes with his friends he uses heavily. He smokes more pot than drug user #1, but he actually drinks far less, maybe only having a couple shots of liquor a few days a month before going to the club. He's not in school, so he doesn't have much use for Adderall, but he does sell crack cocaine for money to support his 9 month old daughter, and when the stress of working as a low level street corner hustler gets to him he'll take a Xanax and smoke a blunt to relax. He would say that he doesn't have a drug problem because he loves smoking weed and thinks it should be legal, anyway. He brags about how much money he makes selling drugs when he's around his street associates but his personal balance sheet doesn't reflect that; really he makes just enough money to keep the lights on, the rent paid, his family supported, and to buy a few nice things for himself. He's not a notorious gang banger, or a high-level king pin (most kids who sell drugs for a living in his neighborhood aren't and never will be).

Critics say the biggest difference between drug user number 1 and drug user number 2, which determines whether or not they need drug treatment, isn't a health-based one pinned to addiction science in any way; it's that drug user number 2 is far more likely to get arrested. After getting arrested he'll be given the option to accept drug treatment as a part of the deal that keeps him out of jail. The incentives for small time hustlers copping to having a drug problem when they get arrested are enormous; who wouldn't admit to having a weed habit and wanting to get help for it if the alternative were two years sitting in an overcrowded county jail?

But is this nonviolent drug offender's primary problem drug addiction, or is it with being black and poor and more likely to be arrested as a result? Especially in big cities where law enforcement is shifting away from targeting drug addicts, instead focusing on the supply side hoping to make gun arrests that can impact homicide numbers, these petty sellers who also use drugs have gotten swept up in the mix and become the new face the nonviolent drug offender instead of a crack or heroin addict.

Thomas says that regardless of the substance one uses, the criminal justice system shouldn't be the doorway through which a user gets to treatment. "It comes down to whether you think addiction is a health problem or not. There's no other health problem that we deal with this way,." she says. "Some people really do develop problematic marijuana use, but I do see people grasping at marijuana disorder diagnoses as a way to stay out of the criminal justice system, and we're filling treatment beds with these people instead of people with more serious drug problems."

Lemaitre, though, stands by the justice system's referral policies for those with disorders, saying people don't get sent to drug programs if they don't have real drug problems. Diversion programs, he says, "are tremendously effective at screening people for their needs. And there are decades of research showing these programs work." He also stresses that the intersection with criminal justice is just one aspect of the administration's drug policy strategy. "In an ideal world all drug users needing treatment would have contact with the health system first. And the cheapest strategy of all is prevention, and we stress prevention, but prevention efforts aren't going to catch everybody. As drug users get further down the scale in terms of their addiction, it's more likely that they get involved with the criminal justice system." He says administration feels that having treatment alternatives in place for those people is an idea that's enormously popular with a broad and diverse coalition of supporters because evidence supports those interventions mixing criminal justice and drug treatment work to reduce costs and improve lives.

"We support the decriminalization of drugs because criminalization has done more harm than good," says Thomas of the DPA, who points to countries like Portugal, which has made drug offenses a civil rather than criminal issue, and Uruguay, which is developing a legal, regulated marijuana market. "In America we need to let go of this idea that the criminal justice system is the best way to deal with this health problem."

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.